Category: Film analysis

We are a family, and the loyalty of the family must come before anything and everyone else. For if we honour that commitment, we will never be vanquished – but if we falter in that loyalty we will all be condemned. –Mario Puzo, The Family   If a body catch a body coming through the […]

The Malayalam filmmaker Don Palathara’s first three films – Shavam: The Corpse (2015), Vith: Seed (2017) and 1956, Travancore (2019) – are marked by the Syrian Catholic setting and the style of slow cinema movement in which they’re shot. Shavam is about a sudden death of a young man in a family. Vith revolves around […]

When Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of the internationally acclaimed Indian filmmakers, launched his first feature film Swayamvaram five decades ago, it was after many years of sustained effort. After passing out of FTII, Pune in 1965, he found it difficult to get a producer who would back him. Hence, he took the initiative of forming a […]

Fire asks society a few uncomfortable questions. Is the desire to love someone beyond the periphery of the heteronormative relationship a sin? Can a woman not love another woman, or a man love another man? Even in this modern age, why do certain societies step backwards and attempt to regulate the bodily desires of individuals? […]

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Anantaram (1987), his fifth film and its three preceding films have a common approach of a biography of an individual. They get deeper and deeper as we move from his second film onwards. While Kodiyettam (1978) follows the carefree Shankaran Kutty attaining maturity, in Elippathayam (1982), Unni is like a rat in a […]

Even before Satyajit Ray made history with his first film ‘Pather Panchali’ in 1955, he had written a script based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novel published in 1916, “Ghare Baire” (The Home and the World) [1], that was to have been directed by a friend Harisadhan Dasgupta according to the official website of Ray [2]. The […]

Artist Warning: this analysis of The Disciple contains spoilers. Artist The protagonist of The Disciple, Sharad Nerulkar, above all is a seeker, and is deeply in love with music, aspiring for absolute union with his art; thus making this a love story, albeit, not a conventional one. The conflict in its external form is society and […]